PHOENIX – When the Dodgers announced their acquisition of Yu Darvish from the Texas Rangers at the July trade deadline, they expressed delight at being able to acquire an elite-level starting pitcher.

And then they went about trying to change him.

Darvish spent the final two months of the regular season changing his arm slot, the timing of his delivery and even his pitch repertoire.

So what didn’t the Dodgers want him to change?

“Andrew Friedman and Farhan (Zaidi), they told me, like, ‘Hey, you should not change your good-looking face,’” Darvish said through his interpreter Sunday. “Just joking.”

No kidding, the Dodgers have treated Darvish the way a house-flipper would treat a distressed property. The changes in his mechanics were “big changes,” Darvish has admitted, aimed at returning him to his pre-Tommy John form. At the same time, the Dodgers have tried to sell Darvish on the benefits of streamlining his arsenal of pitches.

“I think on both ends (mentally and physically) he’s handled it really well,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I think for him it was more of coming over here and trying to figure out why he can’t be consistent. He’s a guy that came off surgery a couple years ago, and so to get that consistency back and a lot of the data that we had that we kind of dug into made things pretty clear for us, and to present it to him was very clear.

“I think that buy-in was huge for him. … Yeah, it’s a lot to take in. But he’s just so athletic, he’s so intelligent, and he competes. So now you take the information part and you take kind of the biomechanics part and just working on his bullpens and trying to have success in a major league game, which is tough. But he’s been really diligent about trying to figure it out.”

Darvish, who will start Game 3 of the Dodgers’ National League Division Series against the Arizona Diamondbacks Monday night, can throw as many as eight different pitches. He has four variations of his fastball (sinker, cutter, splitter and four-seamer), two variations of his curveball (slow and slower), a slider and a changeup.

But just because he can throw all those pitches doesn’t mean he should.

“I think so,” Roberts said when asked if Darvish would be better off with less variety. “That’s something we’ve talked with him about. Focusing on three, four pitches versus six and to be really good at those pitches is better than having more options. That gets cluttered.”

After seeing the data the Dodgers’ front office had collected on his pitch mix, “he was all in,” Roberts said. “It was like a light bulb went on.”

The difference have been fairly subtle. In his nine starts with the Dodgers, Darvish has thrown his four-seamer about 36 percent of the time, a slight increase from his 22 starts with the Rangers this season. He is throwing his sinking two-seam fastball less often and his slider about the same while featuring his cut fastball more often. The slow curveball he threw 30 times in those first 22 starts this season has been ditched entirely and his splitter nearly so (he has thrown three with the Dodgers).

“He’s a guy that can go to all quadrants (of the strike zone),” Roberts said. “He can pitch off the fastball, the cutter, curveball, the change, so I think that he’s simplified a little bit of his pitch mix.

“When we first got him, he was a guy with a bunch of different toys and didn’t really know what to do with them. So with Rick (Honeycutt, Dodgers pitching coach) and the information that we’ve given him, I think that he’s found a nice little rhythm and how to attack guys.”

If a light bulb went on in Darvish’s head, as Roberts said, it must have a dimmer switch. Darvish downplayed the impact of the analytical input he has been receiving.

“I mean, I got information, but I’ve been pitching really well, and right now I’m trying to focus on what I do and not to worry about what they do,” he said. “So basically I want to pitch to my strengths. Of course they gave me information, so I’m going to pitch basically with my strength. And with that little bit of information that they gave to me, I think I can use it, and I think it’s going to be very helpful for tomorrow’s outing.”

Bill Plunkett has covered everything from rodeo to Super Bowls to boxing (yeah, I was there the night Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield's ear off) during a career that started far too long ago to mention and eventually brought him to the OC some time last century (1999 actually). He has been covering Major League Baseball for the Orange County Register since 2003, spending time on both the Angels and Dodgers beats.

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